Hi all,
Busy week the last one and finally I find some time to jump on here and respond to a few of the comments, mostly the ones from T-Vasis.
There was a query about what type of profit (net, underlying, before tax) I was referring to when the piece was written. I was referring to net profit, it says that in the article. Net profit is the one commonly used by all financial commentators in relation to any company and it is the one that makes most sense. It is after the tax is paid, the real amount left to distribute to investors or......Executives.
Another of the comments was to make sure you are comparing the average fleet age with an airline with a similar number of aircraft. I do not accept that premise because this is an "average" fleet age. All airlines pretty much have a different number of planes, you cannot excuse the non replacement of aircraft because another airline who is replacing aircraft regularly only has half the aircraft. As I originally said, Qantas was bragging about its fleet age in their annual reports 8 years ago, now they are not.
Like the mouthpiece from Qantas who tried to debunk my article, assumptions are being made that aren't true. I did not include the FIFO/Network aircraft in the average fleet age. It was Jetstar (Aus)/Qantas and Qantaslink. I didn't include Jetstar franchises overseas because Qantas does not fully own them. I didn't include Network, I didn't need to in order to show that Qantas were neglecting fleet age and they weren't part of the group 8 years ago. I genuinely wanted to compare apples with apples.
I think the long term future of Qantas is in jeopardy with the way the airline is currently being managed.